consulate events
Consul General John M. Koenig Honoring Maureen Magurany
KAP-PA 2000
Adapted Athletics Cultural Development Center
Sunday, December 1, 2002
Conference Center “Ioannis Vellidis” - Thessaloniki
Honoring Maureen Magurany for her volunteer efforts at the “Agios Nektarios” Institute
Remarks by Consul General John M. Koenig
Hello Maureen, how are you.
It is a great honor to accept this award for you since as we just heard you could not be here. I have never seen you in Phoenix before so this is a great treat for me as well.
I was wondering whether I should say a few words about you, if you don’t mind listening to me, describe a little bit about the work that you do, as far as I know it, and our experience working with you and seeing you work.
Maureen Magurany first became involved with the institute Agios Nektarios in Sidirokastro, Serres in 1999, but I first learnt about her activities when I arrived here and she contacted the Consulate in the year 2000.
I learnt quickly that Maureen had devoted much of her life, from when she was a child until her current activities here in Greece, to helping others, many of them with special needs. When she came to my office she described to me and my colleagues at the Consulate some of the work that she was doing with the children and young adults at Agios Nektarios.
She demonstrated tremendous love, commitment, and understanding of the issues and invited me and some of my colleagues at the Consulate to visit Agios Nektarios at a time when she would be there. On that first visit we began to get an idea of what one individual, completely dedicated, completely faithful, can achieve in a very short time. It is not as though she was doing everything alone; obviously, there were other people working there. But this one volunteer, Maureen, managed to show us those young adults as they are. The first thing she did was to show us that these young adults are real humans, individuals, people with names, people with personalities, people with needs but also people with much to give.
So, she introduced us to some of the children and young adults there and we had a chance to go out with some of them. Two of them, Mavrikos and Yannis, because they are more mobile, were people that we really got to know and who demonstrated, with Maureen’s encouragement, tremendous bravery going out and speaking up at a ceremony in the office of the Nomarch of Serres.
Maureen, on her many completely voluntary visits to Sidirokastro, Serres, has managed to organize new arrangements for the way the children and young adults there are treated. She has arranged for people to donate the money needed to get special wheelchairs to give these children greater mobility. She has done many other things to bring the world into Agios Nektarios and to bring Agios Nektarios into the world.
Right now, Maureen is working on a very ambitious plan to create a new place in Sidirokastro where some of the people, children and young adults who live at Agios Nektarios, will be able to be closer to the society that surrounds them. All of us at the Consulate, and many others here in Greece, in Sidirokastro, the AHEPANS, people in churches in America -- all these people mobilized by Maureen -- want very much to help her achieve these goals. Because she does it all for the kids.
You know, in Greece they call those children persons with special needs. They do indeed have many needs, but they also have much to give. They need special care, they need a lot of love. But those kids in Sidirokastro have one thing that they need; they have Maureen.
Therefore, Maureen, nothing could make me prouder to be the American Consul here than having someone like you, an American volunteer, working here for the children at Agios Nektarios.
Thank you.